High Noon in Cyberville : Two Security Experts Square Off Over How Best to Keep the Worldwide Computer Network Safe From the Bad Guys. One Is the Father of SATAN, and the Other Wants to Send SATAN Back From Whence He Came.

Donn B. Parker looks out over the electronic frontier like a 19th-Century lawman surveying the American West. Where others see a landscape of freedom and unfettered hope, he sees something more eternal: another battlefield in the everlasting war between right and wrong, good and evil.

Six-foot-six and husky, with a soothing voice and calm demeanor, Parker is the John Wayne of computer security, the weary veteran who shoulders responsibility for an often-ungrateful community of pioneers. That his badge is a clip-on security tag issued by the company that employs him--the huge and hard-to-define SRI International--hints at the complexity of law and order in the information age.

It is mid-March, and as Parker sits before a computer in his quiet office, he is concerned. In a few weeks, another security consultant named Dan Farmer is planning to let loose on the Internet a free program he calls the Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks. Farmer says that the program will wake up snoozing computer administrators and help them to plug dangerous holes in their systems. But Parker has been warning reporters nationwide that the program’s threat is reflected in its acronym: SATAN.

Parker’s voice is gentle. It lacks any trace of the hysteria some critics attribute to his message: that as everything from international banking to air traffic control becomes increasingly computerized, the future of Western Civilization may hang in the security of the systems linking those computers.

Unless the good guys make a stand, he insists, a handful of weirdo militiamen or religious extremists could sabotage the Net or use it to secretly communicate plans to send the world spiraling into anarchy. SATAN, by simplifying sophisticated computer security analysis, by making it easy for even the clumsiest hacker to do mischief, will nudge the delicate balance of power toward chaos. “We could lose control of society.”

Parker and Farmer are separated by philosophical and stylistic differences that represent a widening divergence in the budding computer security field. On a deeper level, though, their struggle over SATAN lays bare the key issues of the digital era: How will access to information be controlled, and by whom?

Parker began programming in 1954, feeding punch cards into a Univac 1103 about the size of side-by-side boxcars. He looked into his first computer crime at a time when desktop computing was just a gleam in the eyes of Apple’s founders. In the 25 years he’s been with SRI--now as a senior management consultant and founder of the research and consulting company’s International Information Integrity Institute--he’s watched all breed of computer outlaw rob and pillage and stir up trouble. By the time the second of his five books on the subject came out in 1983, the dust jacket could confidently label him “the world’s leading expert on computer crime.” Increasingly, though, the 65-year-old grandfather finds himself out of step with a computer security field that is getting young, brash and cynical about the core values that cement Parker’s world view: Christianity and capitalism.

SATAN is an obvious case in point.

Parker is dressed in a pin-striped charcoal three-piece suit and black wingtips. What little is left of his blond hair is shaved down to a fine white stubble. His tone is direct. SATAN, he says, “has the potential to bring down the whole Internet.”

Which leads to this obvious question: Why would a computer security expert unleash a dangerous weapon against his supposed colleagues?

“You’d have to know Dan Farmer,” Parker says. “He’s a very unusual individual.”

In March, as the thunderheads of controversy gathered, an earnest reporter from a Northern California paper interviewed SATAN’s maker. Apparently OD’d on the esoterics of security programming, the journalist nudged the discussion into human-interest turf.

“Is there anything interesting about your life?” he asked.

“Well,” Farmer said. “I’m bisexual.”

The reporter fiddled self-consciously with his notes, then tried again: “No, I mean, like tennis or knitting or something.”

Muffy Barkocy’s face crinkles with delight as she tells that story over dinner in an upscale San Francisco grill. She runs her fingers through Farmer’s curly red bangs, jostling the gold ring piercing his right eyebrow and the matching ring through her left.

Farmer smiles. In a voice every bit as pleasant and assured as Parker’s, he adds that he’s also into open relationships. And S&M.;

The restaurant’s nicely dressed patrons pretend not to eavesdrop, not to notice the distinctive twosome in their midst. But even in a city where eccentricity is de rigueur, the couple stand out. This evening, for instance, Farmer wears black boots and black leather pants with chrome belt rings. His tresses cascade past the U.S. Marine Corps dog tags on his chest, and his freckled arms poke out from a black sleeveless T-shirt emblazoned with a human skull, two salmon and the slogan “Spawn Till You Die.”He says that another piercing, featuring a tiny skull with one ruby eye, dangles from his nipple.

Back at their second-floor apartment, Farmer pours glasses of $150-a-bottle port wine and begins inching his psyche toward another all-nighter of touch-up programming to meet SATAN’s impending release on April 5--Farmer’s 33rd birthday. With Prince’s “Sign ‘O’ the Times” playing on the stereo, he fires up one of the two computers bracketing his king-sized water bed and mouse-clicks to an introductory screen of quotations culled from newspapers:

“SATAN is like a gun, and this is like handing a gun to a 12-year-old.”

“It’s like distributing high-powered rocket launchers throughout the world, free of charge, available at your local library or school, and inviting people to try them out by shooting at somebody.”

The quotes bring to Farmer’s face a grin that can only be described as devilish. But what has really tickled him this evening is SATAN’s new logo, a drawing given him by artist Neil Gaiman, whose Sandman comics are considered classics among the cyberpunk set. Darkly mysterious, Gaiman’s demon gives the program an ominous air to match the growing trepidation about its launch.

As Farmer admires the creature, with its long, pointed tail and trench coat, Barkocy, a programmer herself, plops down before another terminal on the other side of the bed, sending a wave sloshing beneath a red-and- black comforter. Their apartment is homier than the stereotypical geek habitat. An eclectic library fills the bookcases; eerie black and white paintings by Barkocy’s sister decorate the walls, and the living room’s sliding glass doors look directly into Golden Gate Park’s panhandle. There’s no doubt, though, that the couple’s preferred living space exists in the powerful Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations that bracket the bed, and in the phone lines connecting them to the world. Bland in appearance, these machines are the stuff of computer buffs’dreams: well over $100,000 worth of powerful gadgetry from which the couple run their own Net site, www.fish.com.

“The Net is our home,” says Barkocy, as she answers e-mail and reads from the newsgroups that troop across the screen: rec.food.recipes, soc.bi, alt.fan.tomrobbins. Then she clicks to her Web home page, and to the linked pages about each of their four cats: Chloe, Bright, Flame and Death. Another click, and Farmer’s page pops up, displaying his smiling Gainsborough-esque portrait. Along with the standard computer stuff, he has listed his “obsessions:””I try to write poems, I love music . . . live for philosophy.”

What he doesn’t much care for, Farmer says, is people. But even that assertion is made with a natural charm that seems to belie his words. Suggest that perhaps he’s a friendlier dude than he lets on, and Farmer bristles attitudinal. Yet that nasty boy edge, so precious to so many of the young and wired, is fleeting; he promptly snaps back to a gentlemanly poise.

Farmer was born in Woodland, near Davis, but grew up mainly in Bloomington, Ind., where his father taught economics and international business at Indiana University while his mother, a free-lance writer, reared Farmer and his two older sisters and older brother. Farmer recalls his childhood with neutrality. “I was fairly solitary,” he says. “I didn’t like structured learning. People didn’t seem to be my cup of tea.”

He first dabbled in computers in high school, where he took university computer classes. After a brief and uneventful hacking phase, he entered Purdue University in 1980 to study astronautical engineering and astrophysics. His goal was to become an astronaut. When he found out that NASA required 20-20 vision, he drifted deeper into computer science.

But at age 22, with college failing to meet his ideals, Farmer dropped out of Purdue and joined the U.S. Marine Corps. Recruiters, he told the San Jose Mercury News, were eager to utilize his technological know-how. But he wanted none of it. “I said, ‘No, I want to go out and learn how to kill people. I was interested in implements of mass destruction--from an academic point of view. Being able to blow somebody’s head off at 500 meters with an M-16, that’s an interesting skill to have.”

Farmer went through basic training at Camp Pendleton and spent six years in the Reserves while completing his degree in computer science at Purdue. When the Gulf War broke out in 1991, Uncle Sam called him to active duty. But Farmer had changed. He’d made a few friends. He’d formed some bonds. “The more I got to know people as people, rather than abstractions, the more going out and killing them wasn’t something I could do.” He applied for conscientious objector status. The Marines, he says, gave him an honorable discharge.

Farmer’s youthful hacking phase had been short-lived and uneventful. More quickly than most hackers, he learned to fulfill his lust for the forbidden by reversing the equation, figuring out how to break in legitimately, as a way of helping administrators keep intruders out. While still at Purdue, Farmer took an independent study class under computer guru Eugene Spafford and created a computer security program called COPS. Though it got little media attention, COPS became a staple tool in the field. It landed Farmer a job with the Computer Emergency Response Team, a federally funded organization at Carnegie-Mellon University that issues advisories about problems with computer security. One lesson Farmer learned at CERT, and in later jobs, he says, is that people tend to base the defense of their systems on the hope that no one will find the holes.

“Security through obscurity,” says Barkocy.

In 1994, Farmer took a job with the $1.5-billion computer systems manufacturer Silicon Graphics, where he oversaw the company’s network security program (his business card lists him as “Network Security Czar”). The firm knew that Farmer had been working on SATAN and had no objection to his moonlighting on the project, Farmer says. With Wietse Venema, a security expert at the University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands, he pieced together an easy-to-use graphical interface and armed it with an “inference engine,” a simple artificial intelligence tool that allows the program to detect the nature of a networked system anywhere in the world and deduce potential security weaknesses.

As Barkocy cruises the Net on her terminal, Farmer mouse-clicks to SATAN’s table of contents. Clicking on “Target Selection,” he connects SATAN to his own system. Under “Host Information,” the screen fills with such data as the number and types of computers on-line. Under the heading “Vulnerabilities” appear such bulleted sub-categories as “by Approximate Danger Level.” Another click brings up a page with a list of potential weaknesses, each highlighted by a red dot.

“It’s so much fun to use,” Farmer says. “You just click and watch things happen! Click and watch things happen!” Clicking again, Farmer drives SATAN in deeper, to screens detailing how the problem might be remedied and the steps required to exploit it.

Farmer acknowledges that anyone who gets a copy of SATAN will be able to find those weaknesses. But that exposure, he says, is the only way to prompt Net-wide improvements in security, since it will compel administrators to repair faulty e-mail programs, install “fire walls” to restrict access to parts of the system and generally plug myriad holes that allow crackers who’ve broken into one “trusted”system to hopscotch into another.

For a couple of weeks, Farmer has listened to his new media arch-nemesis sermonize against SATAN. What most offends him, he says, is the mind-set Parker’s views reflect: that certain technological tools or knowledge are too powerful for mere mortals, and must be kept, like magic swords, in the hands of “the computer gods.”

“Donn Parker sees the problem as people,” Farmer says. “He says you cannot trust people with information. But controlled dissemination of information doesn’t work, especially when you’re dealing with security. Information will get out.”

When computer security traditionalists say they’re merely asking him to keep this Pandora’s toolbox away from the bad guys, Farmer wants to know who is going to draw the line between heroes and villains. “What is right, what is wrong, how can anyone say? I view very, very, few things as Right with a capital R.”

When novelist William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in 1982, the fledgling Internet linked only 500 or so host computers. There are now well over a million, and none of them are entirely secure. The Net, after all, was not designed with security in mind. When problems arise, as they do, people hustle to cobble together technical, legal, ethical and political solutions.

There are few credible statistics on how much damage should be attributed to unauthorized computer use. Even when there is no theft of money, copyrighted material or trade secrets, a simple break-in can force a company to shut down its system temporarily and invest perhaps 50 or 100 person-hours worth $20,000 to $30,000 to figuring out what happened. Phone companies say they lose about $1 billion a year to crooks using computers to rip off calling-card numbers and long-distance services. That is also the figure put on annual computer industry losses to pirated software. But few specialists have much faith in computer crime stats. “We all have the gnawing suspicion that there’s a lot more crime than we know about,” says Donald G. Ingraham, a veteran computer crime prosecutor with the Alameda County district attorney’s office.

Such doubt stems from several well-known problems. For one thing, a skillful cracker can, in some cases, traipse about in a system and then wipe his tracks off the electronic logs. Also, it’s usually more cost effective for a business or agency to simply patch the problem that allowed an intruder in than it is to track him down, so most such crimes go unreported. And finally, there’s the embarrassment factor: Bank or brokerage executives would prefer that the public not know that the phone or computer link service they’re selling so aggressively is also convenient for criminals.

A panoply of belief has evolved about how best to get along on the electronic frontier. To oversimplify a bit, fascists demand that the state determine the Net’s fate, libertarians say let the market rule, socialists trust “society” to impose its will and anarchists want to leave it up to every individual with a modem.

Spafford at Purdue equates the growing struggle to similar moments in American history, when visionaries rejected the norms of the mainstream and disappeared into the wilderness to create new communities. But visionaries, by nature, tend not to comprehend the vast range of human behavior from good to bad, he says. Communes usually disintegrate for the same reason so many newsgroups, listserves and bulletin boards on the Net do: It only takes a few aggressive dimwits to make a mess of things.

Esther Dyson, editor of the respected newsletter Release 1.0 is an advocate of self-regulation. She has concerns, though, about Netizen naivete. “Most people on the Net are well educated, upper middle class, and haven’t operated in a world without a moral compass,” she says. Dyson has. As a consultant on computer issues in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, she has watched true bad guys--Politburo bureaucrats and free-market criminals alike--bully their way into weak communities and dominate them.

At the fifth annual Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy in San Francisco in late March, debaters of every stripe stampeded such matters from meeting room to hotel bar and back, and SATAN, naturally, got caught up in the fray. Matt Blaze, an influential researcher at Bell Laboratories--who looks like the stereotyped nerd who played computer chess during school recess--was among those who defended Farmer--even though the latter looks as if he was one of those guys who sat in the back of algebra class playing air guitar.

“Farmer is a well-respected member of the computer security community,” said Blaze. “In general there’s a pretty broad consensus that (security) problems get fixed only by exposing them. Trying to keep them secret just doesn’t work.

“Certainly, if it were possible to determine if someone has an evil heart before you let them use the (SATAN) software, that would be a good thing to do. If Donn Parker or anyone else has a way of knowing that, I’d like to know what it is.”

Donn Parker strides past clapboard barracks on his way from SRI International’s Quonset hut cafeteria to the brick and steel building housing his office. SRI’s headquarters, he explains, were plopped into an abandoned Army hospital designed to house GIs returning from the aborted invasion of Japan. But times have changed. Now there is a “Japan room” on the compound, and the United Nations flag flies alongside the U.S., California and SRI flags.

The world after the supposed “end of history” can be perplexing. With the Cold War over, U.S. intelligence efforts have turned to commercial espionage, he says with an insider’s assurance. Most of the 70 or so corporations that pay SRI’s “4-I” Information Integrity program $20,000 a year for advice are multinational. Parker says he has asked NSA agents just what it means to protect U.S. business interests these days, when a company’s CEO may be German, its principal investors Japanese, its plants in Asia and its headquarters in Des Moines. “They can’t tell me,” he says. Yet the U.S. government insists on mucking about in business matters, by preventing, for instance, companies from protecting the software they export by encoding it--fearing that the encryption technology will fall into enemy hands. “The U.S. government is becoming an enigma for people. That puts information security specialists who work for these large organizations into some bad situations. Is their loyalty to their own government or their employer?”

Situated in one of Palo Alto’s tree-shaded nerd neighborhoods, SRI’s headquarters could be the nondescript offices of a chicken-processing conglomerate. Inside, though, the security checks and signs warning about classified government work give the not-for-profit think tank an aura of serious secrecy. Even in this age of ambiguity, Parker says, there are clear and present dangers.

Parker was born in San Jose in 1929, and grew up in the Santa Clara Valley before it became better known as the Silicon Valley. His father was a sales manager who eventually wound up selling the paper forms that were used in the first computers. There was no such thing as computer science when Parker enrolled in UC Berkeley, so he got his master’s degree in math. Today, he and his wife, Lorna, live in suburban Los Altos. She has no interest in computing, but the couple’s grown son and daughter both have careers that are tied to the digital revolution. For his part, Parker doesn’t use his home PC much. He says he’d rather spend his time skiing in Colorado with his six grandchildren than Net surfing.

As early as the 1960s, he noticed that even those technologists who were churchgoers tended to leave their religion outside their computer workstations. They seemed unconcerned, he says, about such matters as how many workers the machines they seemed to worship might displace. “Ethics didn’t matter; all that mattered was what was technologically possible. I concluded that computer people needed to pay more attention to what these powerful new instruments were going to be used for,” says Parker, an elder in the Lutheran church where he once taught Sunday school. “Working in computer crime and security was a good way to express my strong religious beliefs and ethics in a profession that urgently needed that kind of value.”

Parker ranked himself among the early hackers, back when the word was an honorable term for those with great programming expertise. But a new breed of bad guy quickly evolved. Today, SRI’s computer system is under constant siege from hackers, as is Parker. The infamous cracker Kevin Mitnick, he says, intercepted his e-mail for a year. And recently a phone phreak rerouted the call-forwarding on Parker’s home telephone. “Hackers all over the world heard about it and were calling all day,” he says. As it happened, his wife had just returned home from surgery and was expecting important calls. Otherwise, even Parker might have been amused that everyone who punched in his phone number found their call routed instead to a New York business specializing in hair restoration.

Most pranks aren’t so witty, and on those not-uncommon nights when Parker picks up the telephone to find three or four dozen yammering hackers on the line, he takes time to patiently lecture: “You’re in a dead end culture, wasting the most precious years of your life.”

Cabinets at SRI are jammed with fat files on computer crimes, infamous and obscure. The collection catalogues everything from insiders who use computers to rip off insurance companies and intercept competitors’bidding strategies to hackers who change credit reports and knock down networks with viruses.

In one two-year study alone, Parker says he interviewed more than 80 young hackers in Europe and the United States. “In my view, malicious hackers are essentially juvenile delinquents who lie, cheat and create mayhem, and the more of them we throw into jail who deserve it, the better lesson it will teach those who are getting involved.”

One problem, Parker says, is that information security remains a “folk art.”There are no degrees offered in the subject; no officially sanctified common body of knowledge, no oversight, no formal academic programs. “It’s mostly based on the experience of people who have been at it a long time.”He is encouraged that the first week of April, the nonprofit International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium is offering a six-hour examination on such topics as access control, cryptography, operations security and ethics. He hopes that this new credentialing process will be a first step in unifying the sprawling field.

But other developments strike him as less positive. The April issue of the MIT journal Technology Review, for instance, features a story on changes in the computer security field. It reports that mainstream organizations are increasingly using “tiger squads” of young hackers to solve security problems. These people, the author argues, “are often better grounded in the real-world challenges of keeping information secure than are most of the former law enforcement agents, inventors of new security devices, and academics who have traditionally made up the information-security profession.”

Parker calls such thinking “very dangerous. I think it’s a terribly insidious article.” His brittleness is not without reason. Still vivid in his mind is the case of Kevin Lee Poulsen, the notorious cracker known as Dark Dante, who pleaded guilty last June to cracking into Los Angeles radio station phone-in contests to win two Porsches, at least $22,000 in cash, and trips to Hawaii--among the more innocent crimes of which he’s been accused. Poulsen, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, had had his first run-in with the law in 1983. Impressed with the teen-ager’s skills, SRI International hired the longhaired young man, handed him a security clearance and put him to work on military and encryption projects. In 1988, however, the police again showed up at Poulsen’s door. The U.S. attorney’s office claims he committed more than 40 sophisticated intrusions while employed by SRI. It alleges that he also stole or attempted to steal military secrets and FBI wiretapping plans.

The Dark Dante episode does not amuse Parker. “His hiring was kept a secret from me,” he says. “There are plenty of competent technologists and consultants around. We don’t have to rely on former malicious hackers.”

If cyberspace is to be tamed, Parker says, its pioneers can’t afford to view it as a benign utopia. “I think we should be talking to the enemy, but there are ways to talk to them to gain information in order to defeat them. Enemies are there to defeat.”

What bothers him about SATAN, he says, is that it threatens to ratchet up good guys’ and bad guys’ endless grappling for techno-superiority. By combining a user-friendly program like SATAN with password sniffers and similar cracking tools, even greenhorn hackers will be able to slip into a UNIX system, gain root access, steal or destroy data and be out again in microseconds. “This is not Star Wars. This is here today.”

Which is why, as the April 5 release date looms, Parker and his more traditional colleagues have asked Farmer and Venema to release the program only to the computer security establishment: NSA, CERT, SRI and the like. They reportedly pressured Silicon Graphics, although Farmer has been cautious to distance his work on SATAN from his affiliation with that company. And finally, they have reminded Farmer that he could sell SATAN at a price so high--$15,000 or more a copy, experts say--it would automatically limit its distribution.

But Farmer, who says he can make $2,500 to $3,000 a day as a free-lance consultant, remains uninterested in profit. That makes Parker suspect that his adversary has been tainted by the hacker credo, “all information wants to be free.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Parker says, “that’s an infantile, idealistic concept that is contrary to capitalist free enterprise. I think that’s just an impractical pipe dream. The kind of people who think that way are not in the real world.”

Haight-Ashbury is an unofficial, open-air monument to America’s last significant countercultural revolution, a commercialized crossroads for those continuing to experiment with “lifestyles” engendered in the long-lost Summer of Love. Farmer, who lives off Ashbury, fits in splendidly as he saunters through this neighborhood where adolescent skateboarders with shaved heads rip down the middle of the street dodging city buses, where blended boomer families patronize free clinics, co-ops and enterprises ranging from the Gap to headshops selling overpriced retro tie-dye and bongs.

It’s now just a week before SATAN’s release, and Farmer’s links to the computer security establishment have frayed a bit. He left his $100,000-a-year job at Silicon Graphics a few days earlier because of “philosophical differences” over SATAN, a spokeswoman says. Even before that, lawyers for another company threatened to sue Farmer into oblivion if he released SATAN as planned, he says.

If any of that bothers him it doesn’t show. Among the remaining touches he plans to add to SATAN are a couple of audio clips: snatches of Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype”and Tom Petty’s anthem, “I Won’t Back Down.”

“When I’m not supposed to do something, it becomes more attractive to me,” he says, kicking back in a noisy post-punk bar, drinking Guinness and blowing smoke rings from a clove cigarette. While he was at CERT, Farmer says, he met with the FBI’s leading expert on the psychology of serial killers. “He said that system crackers and serial killers have very similar psychological profiles. They’re not similar in every way--crackers aren’t likely to turn to killing--but they’re both obsessive.” Farmer laughs. “I’m sure I rank right up there.”

He understands the mind-set of people obsessed with unauthorized access into other people’s computers, he says. But he also understands the need to preserve privacy and property. Kevin Mitnick, he alleges, broke into www.fish.com and stole an early version of SATAN. Farmer doesn’t like that. (Mitnick’s attorney says he has no information to suggest that his client invaded either Farmer’s or Parker’s systems.) In fact, though, his system, like SRI’s, is an electronic Alamo, constantly under siege by hackers intent on gaining status among their peers. “By and large,” Farmer says, “I just ignore them. I take things less seriously than most people. There just doesn’t seem to be much of a reason to get upset about things.”

At 7:00 a.m. on april 5, 27 computer sites worldwide opened the door, and SATAN flew out across the nets, sucked into the massive UNIX systems of major corporations and onto PCs in private homes. By very rough accounting, SATAN was downloaded more than 10,000 times in the first three weeks.

For weeks leading up to the release, the Net had buzzed with SATAN the way talk radio buzzes with the Oklahoma City bombing. With the program’s release, newsgroups such as comp.security.unix. lit up with reports of attacks, and reports of systems that crashed after administrators used SATAN. But most security experts on-line cheered the program, praising it as a powerful new tool.

The calamities Parker predicted have yet to materialize, he concedes. But that doesn’t mean evildoers won’t eventually use SATAN to undermine the Net, that his colleagues’naivete won’t come back to haunt them, he says.

In a 1978 People magazine profile, Parker issued a similar warning. “Many computer technologists still think they are functioning in a world of good guys.”

Now, though, the media spotlight has shifted to Farmer. What he and his partner hope to get out of SATAN, beyond notoriety, is hard for some to grasp. Just contributing a classic program to the Net culture is plenty of pay-back, says Venema.

For his part, Farmer--who has a new job in security at Sun Microsystems--figures that companies will make millions of dollars adapting SATAN and repackaging it for commercial release--just as they did with COPS. Yet he insists that he did the right thing in giving it away. “There’s a point when it’s need and a point where it’s greed. People need information. I don’t need more money. I make a ton of money.”

There are rewards, though. “To me, programming and computers are an extension of my philosophy. All they do is what you tell them. It’s a kind of artistic expression that most people don’t see. But I see it very clearly. The whole SATAN thing--this is me.”

The aspect of SATAN that best captures Farmer’s world view is a comic quirk he cooked up as an afterthought, a command called REPENT that transmogrifies the program’s ominous namesake image into a benevolently smiling Santa.

Farmer’s Net handle, “Zen,” reflects his embrace of contradictions: yin and yang, male and female, safety and insecurity. Playing with paradox has obvious appeal in the uncharted expanses of cyberspace, where chaos is the organizing principle.

To those fighting to establish order, such thinking is the product of a culture cut loose from its moral moorings; it is surrender to pandemonium.

For a true believer in ambiguity, that’s cool too. “The world doesn’t make sense,” Farmer says, “and I don’t think it’s supposed to.”